1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method, and more particularly to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method that detects a lesion having an elevated shape existing in a two-dimensional image of an image of living tissue based on the two-dimensional image.
2. Description of the Related Art
An endoscope system including an endoscope and a medical image processing apparatus or the like is widely used in the medical field. Specifically, the endoscope system includes, for example, the endoscope including an insertion portion inserted into a body cavity as a living body, an objective optical system placed in a distal end portion of the insertion portion, and an image pickup portion that picks up an image of the inside of the body cavity formed by the objective optical system and outputs the image as an image pickup signal, and the medical image processing apparatus that performs a process for displaying the image of the inside of the body cavity on a monitor or the like as a display portion based on the image pickup signal. Then, based on the image of the inside of the body cavity displayed on the monitor or the like as the display portion, a user observes, for example, an organ or the like as a subject in the body cavity.
Also, the endoscope system including the above-described configuration can also pick up an image of, for example, mucosa of a digestive tract such as a large intestine as a subject in the body cavity. Thus, the user can comprehensively observe, for example, various comprehensive findings such as a color tone of the mucosa, a shape of a lesion, and a microstructure of a mucosa surface.
Further, in recent years, an endoscope apparatus has been proposed that can produce a three-dimensional model of a subject based on data of a two-dimensional image according to an image pickup signal of an image of the subject picked up by an endoscope.
Meanwhile, as a method for identifying a lesion having an elevated shape such as a polyp in a three-dimensional model produced by, for example, CT (Computed Tomography), a method is proposed that can identify the lesion by evaluating a shape of the three-dimensional model based on a shape feature value such as ShapeIndex or Curvedness as described in US Patent Application Publication No. 20030223627.